In a year where winter has been hard to find, it's finally making itself known across the northern United States. The Northwest is seeing a multi-day winter storm that has over 200,000 without power on Puget Sound. The good news for Seattle and surrounding area is that temperatures are forecast to rise this weekend. This will keep any upcoming precipitation in the form of rain.

Cold air has settled in across the northern quarter of the U.S. Current temperatures in North Central Minnesota are currently below zero.

This, along with the winds, are creating dangerous wind chills across parts of the Dakotas, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

There are already Winter Weather Advisories out across the Upper Midwest through Friday evening.

Most areas are expecting around 2-4" of snow through Friday evening. Chicago's expecting 4-6" of snow and Milwaukee is expecting 3-5".

The storm should then move into the Northeast for Saturday. Again, most areas are expecting 1-3", however, Pittsburgh is in a narrow band that is expecting 3-5" of snow from Friday night through Saturday.

A late winter weather system is causing quite a mess across the middle of the United States. Parts of Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin and the UP of Michigan are in Winter Storm Watches/Warnings for today and tonight. Snow accumulations are expected to be between 3 and 9 inches across these areas.

At the same time, parts of Louisiana and Mississippi are under a moderate risk of severe weather today/tonight. Any parts of several other states show a slight risk of severe weather.

Much of the southeastern part of the U.S. is already under flood watches or warnings. Residents in these areas should prepare for additional flooding as a result of this new system pushing through.

As always, you can get up-to-minute radar, watches, warnings, severe weather outlooks and storm reports with Weather Defender and its sophisticated layering system. You're in control. You can see as much or as little as you'd like. You can create maps for different situations. For example, you may want a map that only shows watches/warnings/advisories. This can be much less congested than map showing this information along with radar imaging. You could then have a map that shows current radar along with active warnings only. You could then add a layer to track storm attributes (hail, storm paths, etc...).

Expanding on our previous posting concerning High Resolution Screen Captures, Weather Defender has a feature that allows you to capture screenshots at prescribed intervals. These can be saved to a folder on your hard drive for future viewing, archiving, or even to combine into a custom animation as shown here to watch major weather events as they unfold.

The animation shown here was captured during the major winter storm that affected 30 states at the beginning of this month.

The steps to setup timed captures are very simple:

1. Open the map you wish to view

2. Go to Map at the top

3. Go to Screenshot and hit the down arrow

4. Select Capture Settings

5. You can now set things like:

How often to capture

Where to store the images

Resolution of the images

6. Once you've selected your settings, select OK

7. Under Map and Screencapture again, select Start Timed Captures

You're now off and running. The files will be stored to the directory of your choice as can be seen here: